Debating the African Condition: Race, gender, and culture conflict

Is Ali Mazrui a visonary or a "vacuous" intellectual? Is he recationary, revolutionary or essentially a radical pragmatist? These questions were the focus of a special plenary session of the Conference of the African Assocation of Political Science that took place in Harrare, Zimbabwe, in June 2003. The forum was intended to interrogate Ali Mazrui's contributions in the last forty years or so of his career as an academic. The question themselves capture the magnitude of polarization among different sections of Mazrui's audiences generated by his often provocative propositions amd prescriptions on a wide range of issues---from the role of intellectuals in Africa's transformation to the imperative of pax-Africana, from Tanza-philia to Islamophobia, from the condition of the Black woman to the destiny of the Black race. It is some the exchanges, sometimes intense and even acrimonious, arising from Mazrui's ideas on continetal and global African affairs, from the 1960s ti the present, that constitute the subject matter. Together, they are not only a celebration of Ail Mazrui's own intellectual life as one long debate, but also an intellectual mirror of the conours of some of the hotly contested terrains in Africa's quest for self-realization.

So many 'outside hands' tinkering inside Africa, it's no wonder the Continental Motherland is plagued with divisiveness and dysfunction. As the stench of colonialism lingers on, the rise of Imported Western Secularism will attempt to legitimately replace Traditional African Rationalism. Thus, 'Debating the African Condition' is a far cry from "Solving the African Problem". This book contains nearly 500 pages of rehashing the obvious. This is not a good book; and clearly was written to appease the westernized academia and not the Africanized populace.

About the author (2004)

Alamin Mazrui is an associate professor of African Studies at Ohio State Uinversity. He is a member of the board of Directors of the Kenya Human Rights Commision. His ublications include Swahili, Society and the State(1995), The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience(1998), both with Ail A. Mazrrui, Out for the Count: The 1997 General Elections and the Prospects for Democracy in kenya(2001), co-edited with Macel Rutten and Francois Grignon, Black Reparations in the Era of Globalization(2002) and English in Africa: After the Cold War(2004).

Willy Lutunga is the executive director of the Human Rights Commission. He taught law at the University of Nairobi, serverd as an advocate and chairperson of the Law Society of Kenya, and has recently been appointed senior counsel by the president of the Republic of Kenya. His many publications include The Rights of Arrested and Accused Persons(1990) and Constitution-Making from the Middle: Civil Society and Transition Politics in Kenya, 1992-1997(1999).